Creative Writing
A writing sample from my commentary on the “online dating site” business.
All you Need is Love
#LOVE is the number one utilized hashtag on social media sites like Instagram, YouTube, Twitter, Pinterest, TikTok and Facebook to name a few. No surprise there.
So what the heck is a Hashtag? It’s user-generated tagging that enables you to cross-reference content by topic or theme. kind of like a File Folder with a label on it. It makes it easy for you to find stuff you like on social media. Like “Love” or maybe like “Esteem”.
Everybody has needs according to Maslow who was a famous American psychologist from the 1940s. Here’s his take on the hierarchy of our needs.
Love is one of everyone’s basic needs… right up there after food and water and safety at the very bottom in the “Physiological” layer. Love is shown above smack in the middle of Maslow’s triangle.
There are about 8 billion people in the world and, according to Maslow, they all need Love. And even though we know that many do not have access to a smart device, apparently there are around 4.9 billion that use social media on a regular basis. That statistic is on the internet so it must be correct. ... right?
If you were to search the internet by typing the hashtag #selfactualization, the one at the top of the pyramid, you would discover that you could reference 244,000 instances of that hashtag appearing.
That’s 244 thousand!... roughly the population of Kitchener, Ontario. Quite an impressive number of references! If you, however, searched the internet by typing hashtag #love you would expect to discover 2,100,000,000 instances! … or 2.1 billion for those having trouble counting zeroes. .... roughly 55 times the size of the entire Canadian population.
So Love is here to stay. That explains why Omar Khayyam, Khalil Gibran, Shakespeare, Wordsworth, Tennyson or any of the other great artistic and poetic geniuses and muses never penned one of their great works about “esteem” or “self actualization”! The great memorable plays and poems and novels and songs are all about "Love".
The Beatles sold about 250 million albums and their number-one-selling song ever was “She Loves You “.
Go figure!... I’ll bet that nobody is surprised.
I suddenly noticed on television the eHarmony ads with the older gentleman with grey hair touting the fact that “every 14 minutes somebody finds love on eHarmony!”
I also wondered how they came up with that statistic since there are about 8 billion people in the world. How do they know that every 14 minutes one of them would find love on eHarmony? ………… and anyways wouldn’t it take two “somebodies” to find love?
“MATCH”, another dating site, proudly promotes the fact that “people who use MATCH are three times more likely to find love than people who do not”
… another incredible statistic I’m sure since they have surveyed all the 8 billion people in the world and inquired about their love lives.
The Match Group’s humble corporate Mission Statement is …
” to spark meaningful connections for every single person worldwide”!
Let’s see now if, in accordance with their humble mission statement, MATCH sparked a meaningful connection to all of the 8 billion people in the world and every single new connection or client paid $19.95 per month… Wow! ... that’s a lot of money for MATCH.
The Match Group is one of the larger companies with revenues of $3.2 Billion. In 2023 Match has at least 38 different brands or categories catering to absolutely every want or need.
